Archive for the ‘Family matters’ Category

Edit!: Guideline for widow exemption from English language Income Tax Guide for 2009

Last fall a single mother living in Osaka started a petition to get the city government to reduce the fees she paid for daycare. Her argument is based on the widow’s exemption (kafu kojo), which is granted to certain people on their income tax returns. Though many single parents qualify for the exemption, this woman does not. The exemption only applies to women whose husbands are dead (or missing) or who are divorced, regardless of whether or not they have children.

According to an article in Tokyo Shimbun, the petitioner was engaged to get married, but during her fifth month of pregnancy her fiancee got cold feet and left her. It was too late to get an abortion, so she quit her job in Tokyo and moved back to her parents’ home in Osaka. Three months after giving birth she started working part-time, and later secured full-time regular employment. Consequently, her income increased, and thus she had to pay more for daycare since the center where her child was enrolled determines fees based on income.

In Japan “income” (shotoku) is considered to be the amount of money on one’s tax return after all exemptions and deductible expenses are subtracted. Because this woman is not a widow or a divorcee, but rather a single mother who has never been married, she doesn’t qualify for the exemption, which is either ¥350,000 or ¥270,000, depending on circumstances. And since she can’t take the exemption, her income is higher, and thus she pays more for daycare.

The Japan Federation of Bar Associations agrees with the woman, but actually goes further by saying that the law itself is unfair since it discriminates against certain types of single parents. As the name of the exemption attests, it was not originally enacted for the benefit of single mothers but rather for widows. The law went into effect in 1951 to help thousands of women whose husbands were killed in the war. Since then the law has been revised several times. It was expanded to include divorced women with children, and then divorced women without children (but who weren’t getting alimony).

Ho-hum. Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo Disney Sea recorded another record season. Between April and September, Japan’s favorite theme parks were visited by 13.25 million people, a 23 percent increase over the same period last year, which is understandable given that “self-restraint” was the order of business in summer 2011 after the earthquake and tsunami. Still, that’s an impressive increase under any circumstances since it translates as an operating income of ¥39 billion — double last year’s — and a net profit of ¥25.5 billion — triple last year’s.

Yumiko Yamashita! You are the 100 millionth visitor to Universal Studios Japan!

But TDL isn’t the only theme park that did well this summer. According to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, attendance at Universal Studios Japan in Osaka was up 19.5 percent during the same period, Tokyo’s Toshimaen amusement park saw an 18.7 percent rise, Yomiuri Land in western Tokyo 30 percent, Nagashima Spa Land in Mie Prefecture 3 percent, Fujikyu Highland in Shizuoka Prefecture 4 percent, and even the Dutch theme park Huis Ten Bosch in Kyushu, which almost went bankrupt before being bought by travel agent H.I.S., enjoyed an 11 percent year-on-year boost in attendance from Jan. to June.

Could all this healthy leisure spending be explained by a post-disaster recovery bump, as theorized by Sankei Shimbun? A recent segment of the TBS noon-time wide show “Hiruobi” looked into the matter and found that there’s something else involved, namely a confluence of demographics that has resulted in wider-open wallets. The program sent a reporter to Universal Studios to cover the 100 millionth admission and found that a good portion of park attendance was made up of families of three generations, with the youngest layer comprised of very young children and the oldest of grandparents who are recently retired but still relatively young and, more importantly, have a lot of savings they’re only too happy to spend on their grandkids. “My grandma buys me anything I want,” said one little girl without shame.

The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry just released the results of a survey on quitting. Among the various categories of employment studied, education proved to be the field with the highest percentage of turnover: 48.8 percent of first-time teachers quit their jobs within three years of being hired. Though the study didn’t give reasons for the high turnover rate it isn’t difficult to figure out: Teaching children is a high-stress occupation with little monetary reward.

The same goes for a subset of education, daycare, which continues to pose a very real problem. The lack of daycare facilities for children not old enough to attend school is one of the main reasons young couples are not having more children. According to a recent feature in Tokyo Shimbun, the main reason there are not more daycare centers is that, while demand is increasing as more women remain in the workforce after giving birth, there aren’t enough hoikushi (nursery school teachers). And the reason there aren’t enough hoikushi is that wages are bad and getting worse.

The average monthly pay for a hoikushi, regardless of age or experience, is about ¥200,000, which is almost 40 percent lower than the average monthly pay across the board. But hoikushi tend to work longer hours than the average worker, especially since the Child Welfare Law was revised in 2001, thus allowing more private companies to set up for-profit daycare centers. Average pay for daycare workers dropped after 2001, and private centers tend to hire staff on a non-regular basis, meaning no benefits. According to HLW Ministry statistics, there were 1.12 million licensed daycare workers in Japan in April 2012. However, Tokyo Shimbun reports that few of these people actually work in daycare.

Last month the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released statistics from 2009 related to the cost of education in 31 developed countries. For the third year in a row, Japan was the lowest in terms of portion of GDP spent on education and schools: 3.6 percent, which, while being 0.3 percentage points higher than in 2008, is still much less than the average, 5.4 percent. (Denmark, for the record, spends the most: 7.5 percent.) Not surprisingly, Japanese families spend more for college than anyone else in the world, and in terms of how much of the money spent on education was from private individuals, Japan ranked third at 31.9 percent (after Chile and South Korea). The world average is 16 percent.

In addition, the Ministry of Internal Affairs reports that in 2010, the year the ruling Democratic Party of Japan did away with tuition for public high schools, the average family with a full-time salaried head of household still spent 5.7 percent more for education than it did the year before. In the same class of households that had high school or college students, the increase was 9 percent.

On average, a household spent ¥1.91 million a year on education, down ¥700,000 from the previous year probably owing to the tuition break. That’s about 37.7 percent of the average family’s yearly income, and the poorer the family, the greater the burden: for families that earn ¥2 to ¥4 million a year, the portion spent on school is 57.5 percent. And if you wonder where all this money goes, don’t blame teachers, whose average salary over the past ten years has decreased by 9 percent.

It also doesn’t seem to be going to school infrastructure. The education ministry says that 60 percent of all public elementary and junior high schools in Japan are at least 30 years old and have never been renovated. In major cities such as Tokyo and Osaka, the portion is 70 percent. The part of the physical plant that tends to show its age the most are the restrooms. In fact, Japanese public school lavatories are infamous, as evidenced by all the J-horror movies that take place in them. Invariably they are described with “the 3 Ks” — kusai (smelly), kitanai (dirty), kurai (dark).

With the rapid aging of society it pays to pay attention to all the latest economic statistics regarding old people, and lately we’ve come across quite a few. Here are some new numbers about households in which the designated head-of-household is 65 or older, carried in the Asahi and Tokyo Shimbuns.

Keep on pushin’

The average monthly income in 2011 was ¥185,000, which is about ¥3,000 less than the average in 2010.

Average spending is ¥221,000 month, meaning that the average household is ¥36,000 in the hole.

However, in 2011 average savings for households when there are at least two people stood at ¥22.57 million. Savings among seniors has been increasing gradually since 2008, but the statistic may be misleading since it is heavily weighted toward upper income households newly entering the senior demographic. Median savings is ¥14.6 million.

5.44 million people over the age of 64 worked in 2011, which represents 27.6 percent of the nation’s population over that age; 46 percent of men and 26 percent of women between the ages of 65 and 69 worked.

Total number of people over 64 exceeded 30 million in 2011, with 50,000 over the age of 100.

As reference, in 2005, when the number of elderly was slightly over 26 million, about 2.2 percent were collecting welfare. The average monthly welfare payment for two-person elderly households in Tokyo was ¥122,000 and for outside of Tokyo ¥94,500. About 47 percent of elderly who received welfare also received some sort of government pension, at an average of ¥46,000 a month.

In principle, a jumokuso customer will have his ashes mixed with other customers. It costs ¥134,000 for roughly cremated remains and ¥44,000 for remains that have already been reduced to ash (a more involved and thus more expensive process). Enough space for 10,700 people is being planned for the park, and the first group of 500 “plots” was recently sold via lottery. There were 8,169 applicants.

Obviously, many people are not attached to the traditional Japanese style of burial any more, and it probably has a lot to do with the traditional funerals that go with it, which can be extremely expensive. A recent Asahi Shimbun article described a woman in her 60s who was shocked when she received the bill for her husband’s funeral. The funeral service company had quoted ¥1.7 million for the whole thing, but the invoice came to ¥2.6 million.

Last week, the research department of Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance released the results of its annual summer vacation survey. For the second year in a row, projected spending for summer vacation dropped from the previous year’s spending. On average, households say they plan to spend ¥82,974 this year, down from ¥84,848 last year. It is not the lowest amount on record, however. In 2008, households said they would spend ¥76,955, but that was the year after the subprime crisis and the Lehman Brothers “shock.” The next year, spending recovered but has been declining ever since.

What the roads won’t look like in the middle of August.

Yasuda hasn’t analyzed these findings, so it’s not entirely clear if the reason for the decline is lack of disposable income due to the ongoing recession or fear of spending any money because of an uncertain future. However, the amount of spending jumps considerably when children aren’t involved. Households consisting only of couples said they would spend on average ¥100,191, which is much more than it was last year. A relatively large number of couples say they will be traveling overseas.

In any case, the majority of all respondents said they would stick close to home this summer, 62 percent, to be precise. It’s the seventh year in a row that “staying at home” topped the list of answers to the question, “What do you plan to do?” Other answers (respondents can tick more than one) included “return to my home town” (39.4 percent), travel domestically (37.4 percent), and visit theme parks, public pools, camping sites, etc. Among the reasons given for staying at home this year, the most common was “to recover my strength,” followed by “it costs too much to travel.”

It’s unfortunate that Yasuda didn’t get even more detailed in this line of inquiry. For example, of the people who said they would visit their home towns, 52 percent also said they would get there by automobile. Considering the monumental “u-turn rush” traffic jams that occur during the specified holiday period, it might have been interesting to find out how many people decided not to go home because of traffic jams and crowded trains. It’s easy to blame apathy about summer vacation on economics, but logistics has a lot to do with it, too, especially when they’re qualified by financial considerations. These things all go together.